Soaring to success with drones

Brandon Torres Declet ’97

"Union was good at allowing students to think outside the box. And as soon as you start doing that, you start thinking about how you can make a change."

Brandon Torres Declet ’97 learned to think creatively at Union, and it’s helped him become an innovative businessman.

“Union was good at allowing students to think outside the box,” Declet recalled. “And as soon as you start doing that, you start thinking about how you can make a change. My political science degree and everything I learned at Union has influenced Measure and where we’re going.”

Measure, of which Declet is CEO and co-founder, is the nation’s leading Drone as a Service® company, providing solutions to acquire, process, and deliver actionable aerial data and media to enterprise customers.

“We do everything for our customers, many of them Fortune 500 companies. We provide the drones, we operate them, we use them to collect aerial data and then we analyze that data,” Declet said.

What kind of data? Measure’s inspected cell towers for Verizon; collected aerial footage in the aftermath of natural disasters for Fox News and CNN; and done site audits for huge engineering firms.

Data is even how Measure got its name.

“We collect data and we use it to measure things—the height of a cell tower or progress on a construction site,” Declet said. “So that’s the reason we came up with Measure.”

And these measurements are in demand.

“Since 2014, we’ve grown to about 55 employees and we’ve raised about $28 million in venture capital,” Declet said. “We’re based in Washington, D.C. but also have offices in Los Angeles and New York City.”

Prior to founding Measure, Declet served in several senior positions on Capitol Hill, including as counsel with the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the House Homeland Security Committee, specializing in national security, technology and related issues.

Declet holds a J.D. from the Fordham University School of Law and an L.L.M. from the Georgetown University Law Center.